Lecture 3 - Collective Choice
Private and Public Goods
The Commons
Comparative Politics - POLS 3311

Today

• Announcements

       - Paper will be posted to Canvas for Monday. You do not need to read it. We will go through it in class as an example of "how to read" an academic article. You will need to have it with you, either electronically or printed.
        - Reading dates will be posted. Bring those to class with your preferences. 

Collective choice

• Overview/Review - why study it?
• Why is collective choice a problem?
• Types of goods - private and collective
• Problems in collective choice: next week

Collective choice:

Elinor Ostrom 1933-2012

• 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics “for her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons”
• President of the American Political Science Association, 1996-1997
• President of the Public Choice Society

Collective choice

**“…the theory of collective action is** central subject of political science.”

“core justification for the state”

Collective choice

• “core justification for the state” - Ostrom
• More generalizable than studying the state: includes state alternatives, entities in failed states, competing states, non-state entities, quasi-state entities
• Irrational results of group action

Why is collective choice a problem?

• Collective vs private goods

        - Optimal use - externalities in private goods
        - Efficient use - incentives in collective goods

• Rational individual choices don’t sum to rational group outcomes for either set of problems for different reasons

• Examples in collective goods:

        - Prisoner's dilemma 
        - Arrow's impossibility theorem

Types of economic goods

Types of economic goods

Types of economic goods: Examples

What was the first public good?

What was the first public good?

Two problems with security: Who pays?

Free riders

Two problems with security: Who provides?

Mafia, Warlords, Stationary Bandits

The first governments

Mancur Olson - Stationary Bandits

Authorship, License, Credits

• Author: Tom Hanna

• Website: tomhanna.me

• License: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.</>